Cooking Channels Owns .TV Domain But Doesn’t Use It for Branding

I recently noticed that my cable tv provider added a new channel to the already huge lineup. The Cooking Channel features a number of cooking shows featuring famous as well as up and coming chefs. I guess it’s probably because the Food Network focuses on more than just cooking.

While watching Kelsey’s Essentials, I heard her mention the url of the Cooking Channel’s website, and I was a bit surprised by what they chose: CookingChannelTV.com. The Cooking Channel does own CookingChannel.TV (a name the company acquired sometime between May and July 2010), but they understand that most people know .com, so they are branding CookingChannelTV.com instead.

They do smartly forward the .TV domain name to their website, but it was somewhat surprising that they didn’t use .TV and do the reverse since that almost seems more intuitive.

Unfortunately for Scripps (the owner of the Cooking Channel), CookingChannel.com is owned by Reflex Publishing, a company that is known to not sell its great generic domain names.

About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, LLC, a company that has sold seven figures worth of domain names in the last five years. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest.

Hi, What about Operah’s OWN.tv? It’s going to be huge! Dr. Oz, Suze Orman and Dr. Phil are on board. It looks to be interactive TV with people from home participating remotely, asking questions and whatnot. There are a couple other examples here: Starting.aSmallBusiness.net™

“Elliot, there you go again, trying to manipulate a story to give dot tv a negative spin.”

Maybe your eyeballs are stuck in the back of your head because I was not the person who said ““No one outside the domain community knows what .TV is…?” That was said by someone else who commented.

I said, “they understand that most people know .com, ” and that is 100% accurate.

Perhaps you should unroll your eyes and you will see more clearly what is right in front of them.

Oh… PS… when was the last time I said something negative about .TV? I don’t think I am deserving of a “there you go again.” Although, I obviously do think .com is where the money is at – at least it’s where the money is and has been at for me.

“I’m pretty sure you both live in the good old US of A and you both probably think .com rules the world. I feel sorry for you already.”

@ Next Please

I live in the US and .com DOES rule the world. Sure, individual ccTLDs are very popular in many countries throughout the world, but .com still rules. I’ve built my business around that and haven’t looked back nor sold a ccTLD.

When I lived in the States, I didn’t give much weight to .TV. However, I now live in Central America and .TV is used quite extensively. Every television channel and even tv show has it’s own .TV URL. I noticed that it is also very popular in Germany, particularly for CityName.tv domains. Every city has a popular .TV website which is advertised pretty heavily on cars and billboards.

I think Elliot was exactly correct, it is surprising that they wouldn’t have used the 2 URL’s opposite to how they have (i.e. – Redirect the dotcom to the dottv.)

No one outside of domaining does know what .TV is. I just started a new business and debated acquiring a .TV with the partners, neither of which are domainers, and they both said they had never heard of .TV and didn’t want to invest in something they’d never heard of.

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